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Civilization 7 Opens To Mostly Negative Reviews As Players Call It An "Unfinished Mess"

Thick Thighs Save Lives

NeoGAF's Physical Games Advocate Extraordinaire
While Sid Meier's Civilization 7 launches on February 11, those who bought the Deluxe Edition can already play the game a few days beforehand. This kind of advance access for higher tier versions brings in more earnings, as well as acts as marketing for the game, via reviews and word of mouth. However, it seems to be doing the opposite for Civ 7.
As it currently stands, the game sits on Mostly Negative reviews on Steam, with over 1,200 reviews. The biggest complaints appear to be about the game's UI feeling unfinished. As you'd imagine, a strategy game like Civ 7 requires an in-depth and intuitive interface and menu options, but many claim it feels like a pre-alpha build.

"A couple minutes in and it's just... so blatantly unfinished, especially by Civ standards<" says one user review. "The UI is total slop, everything looks super janky, the resource icons are like stock images from 1998. There is no discernible aspect of care put into the game, and that's something I never expected from Firaxis. Comparing this unfinished mess to the Civ VI release is night and day."
mixcollage-06-feb-2025-03-26-pm-6218.jpg

Apart from the UI, a lot of the reviews have also been slating the art and the icons. Some have even commented on the lack of maps in the game. While more will probably be added soon, players feel like there are too few at launch. However, the biggest observation many players made was that the game overall feels like it was made for console and then carelessly ported to PC.

This strangely seems in contrast with critical reviews, as Civilization 7 scored 81 on MetaCritic at the time of writing.
 

Brakum

Member
Good. I like the game. Does it deserve those reviews as a whole? Not really. But firaxis/2k do.

Giving a good review and mentioning the negatives on the side is meaningless. People dont read reviews for the most part, they just see that tag. If they deliver games like this and reviews end up being positive, that's all that matters to them and they'll keep doing it. The negative reviews just might have a little impact in how they do things in the future.
 

Hudo

Gold Member
I hate that Firaxis are imitating Paradox' business model of releasing barebones DLC platforms at full price.

Also fuck Paradox for dropping Imperator: Rome. Last time I've bought a game from them.
 
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Mr Hyde

Member
Another broken, unfinished piece of shit game. When will publishers learn? And when will gamers learn to not give in to this early access shit? This game belongs in the trash can along with the rest of the thousands of unfinished garbage games that gets released today.

New York Nyc GIF by Storyful
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I havent played a Civ game since dabbling with the first one 30 years ago. All I remember is all the PC AI ganging up on you. I remember I sucked at the game too. lol

Some have even commented on the lack of maps in the game.

The game doesn't have random maps like the old game? Or it does, but people are perhaps complaining about the lack of canned story maps or something?
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I immediately tuned off on this game the moment I learned what they did with forcing you to swap civilization on every passing era.
Terrible idea.
Any game that forces players to do that is bad. Concord did the same. After each match you won, you had to choose a different character. I never got into Darkest Dungeon either because their system of fatigue/stress/disease whatever requires gamers to rotate characters in and out when they are healthy or out of commission. I play the game for the first time and it's pretty cool. Next thing you know two of my guys are in bed at the inn or in asylum and cant be used for 2 weeks or something.

It's like one part forced onto gamers to make them spread out their gameplay across the board, and one part artificially extending the game time as players need to get accustomed to new characters/factions etc...

It's a dumb idea because for me when I play shooters or fighting games back in the day, I like sticking to a limited number of loadouts or characters. And for strategy games, I'm kind of the same too. Play through the match as one faction.
 
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Still bought it, watched a stream of someone playing for an hour and it looked pretty awesome to me. There's some minor bugs and the UI needs some tweaking, but nothing game breaking. Calling this an unfinished mess is the hyperbole of the year.

The internet likes to drama whenever possible.
 

Brakum

Member
Still bought it, watched a stream of someone playing for an hour and it looked pretty awesome to me. There's some minor bugs and the UI needs some tweaking, but nothing game breaking. Calling this an unfinished mess is the hyperbole of the year.

The internet likes to drama whenever possible.
The UI is objectively unfinished. It's not just bad. The game cant even tell you the difference between the map types. Or the game speeds. The game doesnt tell you the unique abilities of scouts. So if you just looked at the tooltip, it would appear as warriors being objectively better than scouts, always. Sometimes you get to choose between a free warrior or a migrant? What does a migrant do? Who knows, there is no tooltip there. What does happiness do? Lets check the tooltip. Ahh 'Happiness'. Got you. Happiness is happiness duh.
 
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Shifty1897

Member
I immediately tuned off on this game the moment I learned what they did with forcing you to swap civilization on every passing era.
Terrible idea.
An absolutely bizarre choice. I imagine it's an attempt to stop people from stopping in the mid game because they found it too hard to shift victory goals halfway through a game, but completely changing your Civ is not the solution in my opinion.
 

YOU PC BRO?!

Gold Member
I’m really not with the civilisation switching every era. Such a bad idea from the jump. Seriously, all they had to do was reduce the number of leaders at launch but make each civilization totally unique. There just wasn’t enough of a difference in gameplay between the civs… each should play completely different, have more unique technology paths and units. I’m a huge fan of the franchise but I’m gonna sit this one out until the dlc and few major patches drop.
 

tmlDan

Member
I immediately tuned off on this game the moment I learned what they did with forcing you to swap civilization on every passing era.
Terrible idea.
Yea, im not on board with this, did they just do this to switch things up and make the game less linear? im not sure i get the change
 

Brakum

Member
Yea, im not on board with this, did they just do this to switch things up and make the game less linear? im not sure i get the change
I personally like it. I think the idea is to have a good civ the entire game. Instead of having an early game civ that loses relevancy later on, or a late game civ that really doesnt do much in the early game.
 

Kenneth Haight

Gold Member
As many other people have said, I’ll wait until the complete edition is £20 in a year or so. No need to rush in to this, the leaders not being tied to the nations is ridiculous but whatever.
 
The UI is objectively unfinished. It's not just bad. The game cant even tell you the difference between the map types. Or the game speeds. The game doesnt tell you the unique abilities of scouts. So if you just looked at the tooltip, it would appear as warriors being objectively better than scouts, always. Sometimes you get to choose between a free warrior or a migrant? What does a migrant do? Who knows, there is no tooltip there. What does happiness do? Lets check the tooltip. Ahh 'Happiness'. Got you. Happiness is happiness duh.
Yea that sounds bad. I guess the UI plays a pretty damn big role in a game like this, it's almost THE game.

Personally I don't like how everything in the UI looks the same as well, celebrations, events, diplomacy screens: everything is a bunch of text in a grey box.
 

Lorianus

Member
They desperatly want to pull a Paradox Interactive to sell the whole package for 500€ in a few years, just look at all the Stellaris and Crusader Kings dlc's, things that should be in the main game sold for 10-15€ after release.
 
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tmlDan

Member
I personally like it. I think the idea is to have a good civ the entire game. Instead of having an early game civ that loses relevancy later on, or a late game civ that really doesnt do much in the early game.
I'll have to try it out myself before making my final judgement, i just think its strange
 

Mortisfacio

Member
Feels like it's been 20 years since the last time a Civ game came out with mostly positive reception. They end up getting better with more DLC's, but it's amazing how long they've fumbled their launches.
 

dave_d

Member
I havent played a Civ game since dabbling with the first one 30 years ago. All I remember is all the PC AI ganging up on you. I remember I sucked at the game too. lol
Pretty much why I threw in the towel on Civ3. Tried playing the tutorial which basically didn't tell me anything. (I had played 2 but did the tutorial to find out about the new stuff which it didn't bother.) I got stuck on a piece of land with no resources and only one way off that required me to go through an enemy city. No matter what I negotiated they always refused me so I couldn't get off so I wasted a ton of resources trying to take out that one city so I could get off my chunk of land. Yeah and as soon as I took out the city (and didn't have anything left to set up my own) there just happened to be a settler from another civ ready to put their new city right where the old one was. (Yeah and they didn't want to negotiate either.) Pretty much uninstalled it at that point and sold the game.
 

TheStam

Member
It's hard to make a game like this feel "fresh". I have played thousands of hours since Civ II and it feels like I would buy this and finish one run at most. Just like with Football Manager, I think I am just done with it.

And you have the whole Paradox DLC money milking bullshit on top of that as mentioned above.

I don't know why I shouldn't just play Civ IV or V. I will at least wait with this one.
 

Miyazaki’s Slave

Gold Member
I immediately tuned off on this game the moment I learned what they did with forcing you to swap civilization on every passing era.
Terrible idea.
Could you explain what you are referring to? I played up through V then stopped, but the way I am reading this post is if you start a game from nothing and you build up through the ages (like in Civ V) when you pass into a new era are you saying that you have to start over in the same game with a different civ but in the new era you passed into?

Sorry, I have not followed any thing for this game but was looking forward to jumping back in. I might just be misunderstanding something.
 

Hari Seldon

Member
It is pretty clear to me that this game is being designed around selling many mini DLCs, that is why they made the leaders separate from the civilizations. They can pump out unlimited leaders because over time people will max out the existing ones with the rogue-like mechanic, and it is way easier to make a leader than design a whole new civ. The problem with this game is the problem with most other western games right now, they care about monetization first and second, with gameplay a distant third place.
 
The game doesn't have random maps like the old game? Or it does, but people are perhaps complaining about the lack of canned story maps or something?
Right now, the only size maps you can have is Tiny, Small or Standard. Bigger maps coming "soon". A lot of the advanced settings from C6 are missing too right now
Anyone trying to play this on console?

I noticed it wasn’t labeled as PS5 Pro enhanced yet was just curious how it was running
Im playing on the standard PS5, there are a few bugs. Theres a memory leak somewhere that crashes the game after about 3hours like clockwork. Ive also had the PS5 shut down on me a few times. It's not overheating...but it's auto shutting down every now and again, no warning

Other than that there's a few little bugs

Missing lots of Leaders and Civ's at launch

Major problem is the game goes too quickly to do much. I tried doing a marathon game in settings, but it's bugged to standard speed. Epic speed does work and that's working at intended
 
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Sentenza

Member
Could you explain what you are referring to? I played up through V then stopped, but the way I am reading this post is if you start a game from nothing and you build up through the ages (like in Civ V) when you pass into a new era are you saying that you have to start over in the same game with a different civ but in the new era you passed into?

Sorry, I have not followed any thing for this game but was looking forward to jumping back in. I might just be misunderstanding something.
Quite simply you don't have a single faction you stick to "from start to end".
The game shipped with 30 factions, but just ten are eligible as starting ones. Then at a certain point during the game you "progress to a new era" and the game asks you to pick what Civilization you'll be among a selection other 10 options, then in the late game same thing again; you'll progress to the modern era and you'll pick one of the ten "modern factions" currently available.

Maybe it will prove to be an acquired taste, but I personally hate the concept.
 
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